The Boys Who Wouldn't Grow Up

about the book

St Albas University might as well be Neverland.

"First you take the drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."-F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Pan, who and what art thou?" he cried huskily."I'm youth, I'm joy," Peter answered at a venture, "I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”-Groucho Marx

“Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age

"'Where is the use of caring for him so very much: he is full of faults.''Is he?' 'All boys are.'”

-Charlotte Brontë, Villete

“One girl is more use than 20 boys.”― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

"I can resist everything but temptation."-Oscar Wilde

“'Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing.'”― E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”-Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

"Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows."-Paulo Coelho

“Ah, clear they see and true they sayThat one shall weep, and one shall stray.”― Dorothy Parker

Drunk at dawn on the first of May, the students of an elite university in Scotland prepare to run into the frigid sea in a centuries-old tradition.

Among the third-year students are Catriona Darlington and Julie Lovejoy: observers to and participants in their peers’ wealthy madness. Between two Mays, they devolve from strangers to enemies as they navigate the social rules of a generation without them and the pressures of life in a suffocatingly small cosmopolitan town.

Tangled up in the chaos of the girls’ gradually intertwining lives are the boys who wouldn’t grow up: a priest-to-be; an oil sheikh-to-be; a cousin and friend who is the keeper of each girl's destructive secrets; and the immoral moral philosophy student whose years-long relationship with Catriona is taking its time in dying.

When the sun rises over the sea on May first of their fourth year, nothing and no one is the same as they were the year before.